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Original findings in under a year
The general of physics
Bush presided over a custom-made brain the size of a room. He counseled presidents and directed the nation's scientists during World War II, and he was called the man who may win or lose the war and the general of physics. He was also the first to see Shannon for what he was, an almost universal genius whose talents could be channeled in any direction.
Against specialization
One of Bush's deepest convictions was that specialization is the death of genius. In an age that was narrowing, he held that the chance to be both broad and deep had not passed with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin. So he pointed Shannon at fields he knew nothing about, genetics among them, and wanted his insights there.
The experiment
Bush later wrote the experiment up like a lab report. The project was his initiative and the hypothesis was his. The subject was a 23-year-old working in a scientific field where he had no training and did not even know what the words meant. The question was whether a scientific genius could produce original findings in less than one year. The conclusion: confirmed.
How can algebra describe genetics?
Shannon's 1940 doctoral thesis, 'An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics,' used symbols to stand for genes and the ways they combine. With it he could calculate how the frequencies of gene combinations in a population change from one generation to the next. He did part of the work at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. Shannon never published the thesis in a journal, and it drew little attention for decades.
How did Bush shape American science in the war?
In 1940 Bush persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee, and in 1941 he took charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Those agencies directed wartime research on radar, the proximity fuze, and penicillin production, and they oversaw the early atomic bomb work. After the war his 1945 report 'Science, the Endless Frontier' led to the founding of the National Science Foundation in 1950.
How did Bush foresee the web?
In July 1945 the Atlantic published his essay 'As We May Think.' It described the memex, a desk-sized device that stored books and records on microfilm and let a user link items into trails. Douglas Engelbart, a pioneer of the computer mouse and hypertext, has said the essay influenced him. Bush wrote it as the war ended, before any electronic computer was in daily use.
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